Data Mesh Vs Data Lake

Data Mesh is not a Data Lake. Nor is it a Data Lakehouse, or a Data Warehouse.

The differences between a Data Lake and a Data Mesh are sort of like that. Whereas a Data Lake is this large body of data in one physical location (eg; object storage in the cloud), the Data Mesh is about the logical and physical interconnectedness of the data from producers through to consumers.

There are two different use cases for data lake and data mesh. If your primary goal is to be data-driven, then a data lake approach should be the primary focus. If it’s important to analyze data in transition then augmenting a data lake with a data mesh would make sense.

While data mesh is great for data in motion, it does not eliminate the need for other data sources like RDBMS and Elasticsearch as they are serving different purposes for the applications they are supporting.